Read Online Making Pretty by Corey Ann Haydu - Free Book Online Page B

says. “Our couch is your couch. You know that.”
    â€œI hate my father,” I say.
    â€œWe’ll adopt you,” she says. I still can’t believe she is the same person she was when they got married seven years ago. It doesn’t seem possible. She changed so much after my father and she split up.
    â€œCan’t you marry him again?” I say. “Wouldn’t that be easiest?” I want the family in my head, the one that doesn’t make me feel alternately claustrophobic and untethered. The completely nonexistent one.
    â€œCome over, sweetheart. Help me make dinner. We can talk about your dad being the worst,” Natasha says. That doesn’t sound right either. I don’t want to hate on my father with his ex-wife. It is impossible to decipher what the fuck I want, to be honest.
    â€œThat’s okay. Thanks. I’ll come over this week for sure. It’s okay. I’m okay.” I don’t sound believable, but Natasha believes me.
    When I hang up, I decide that what I really need, what will really help, is seeing Bernardo after I have it out with Karissa. I tell him to come by later.
    That feels good and all, but I miss the other day and Karissa’s party and the way the world was opening up, because now it is closing back in.

eight
    When I first met Karissa, she had on a pink camisole, a brown leather vest, and no bra. She did a monologue from the play No Exit , and everyone in class watched her with the jaw-open, wet-eyed look of people realizing they aren’t good enough.
    â€œAmazing job,” our teacher said. “Now do it again, but remember that your whole life all anyone’s wanted from you is sex. And you love it, but you’re tired of it too. Right? Don’t apologize halfway through. It’s not okay, what they’ve done to you. How they’ve treated you. And you know that, but you also know it’s your only power. You understand what I’m saying, Karissa?”
    Karissa teared up. She scratched her thighs with her silver fingernails and looked at the ceiling for too long a moment. Donna didn’t like when we tried to escape a difficult part of a scene by sighing or looking away or diffusing it in any way.
    â€œNo, no, leap right in! Get in there!” the teacher said.
    This time, Karissa got choked up halfway through the monologue.The class nodded in unison at the perfection. When she got to the last line, she was on her knees. She was crying, but not wiping away the tears. Not choking them back.
    No one from the outside was supposed to watch class. It was supposed to be a safe, private space. And I guess it mostly was, but the day that Karissa nailed her monologue, my father was at the door, peering in through the tiny window, watching the way her mascara tears made a spiderweb over her face. On someone else it might have looked messy and ugly, but on Karissa, with her brunette waves and unlined, practically translucent face, it was romantic. The mascara made a paisley pattern, black on white, and she looked masked rather than destroyed.
    â€œWho was that?” Dad said after we walked in silence through Washington Square Park to our favorite place in the village, Caffe Reggio.
    â€œWho?” I said.
    â€œThe beautiful one. Without the bra,” Dad said.
    Karissa is not the kind of woman my dad usually calls beautiful.
    The wife he was just about to divorce, Tess, has D cups and platinum hair and an impossibly flat stomach. My father likes impossibly perfect women. He likes them because he makes them possible.
    That’s why when he tells me I’m beautiful, it reeks of lies. I know better. I know what he really sees when he looks at me.
    â€œPlease do not talk about my classmates’ bras,” I said. “Or better yet, please do not say ‘bra’ to me. Ever. Please extract the word from your vocabulary.” I dropped my voice on the word bra because thecafé was cramped and the